Relational Models and Kinky Power Exchange

How Kinky Power Exchange becomes real #4

Photo by Brooke Lark on Unsplash.

Remember this from earlier?

“I’m changing over chastity devices,” I say [… ] Usually that means I get an orgasm.”

My wife looks at me as if I had just asked for a blow job. “Why would that be?” She sounds genuinely puzzled.

I flush and feel weirdly embarrassed. “Because… uh… normally unlocking means cumming…”

That’s how it used to work, but now I’m unsure my tentative enquiry was appropriate.

And then she pretty much shut down the conversation.

There’s a lot going on in this simple interaction. We’ve already unpicked some of it.

I can’t argue with her because on a gut level I am afraid the femdom might go away.

My wife is an enthusiastic dominant, but if I make things difficult for her, then being the dominant stops being fun, it would be against her nature to push on, going through the motions.

Also, I have everything to gain by putting up with things I don’t like in order to get to the next adventure. (This probably applies to play partners as well. The domme is racking up domme time, whereas the sub is suffering towards a particular moment of release, relief, or catharsis. She has no reason to do things she doesn’t like, and if she does stop, he’s suffered for nothing.)

I also don’t feel like arguing with my wife because I’m conditioned to obey her. There are actual pathways laid down in my brain such that my reflexive response is to do as I’m told.

Taken together, power imbalance and conditioning are delightfully scary to contemplate. (I can’t help it. I’m a submissive masochist. My fantasies have always revolved around consent irrelevant scenarios, and actually I’ve gone and trapped myself in one.)

However, there’s something deeper and stranger going on in that interaction: emotions.

That weird embarrassment I felt was not because of a chain of thoughts: I committed to obeying Xena, now I’m arguing with her… therefore I am breaking my promise and should be embarrassed. Instead, I felt an instant mental discomfort akin to what we’ve probably all experienced facing a teacher or some other authority figure.

I think Xena’s initial response was puzzlement. Maybe as the interaction played out there was a little irritation, then a kind of dismissive firmness.

I’m not a mind reader, but I don’t think Xena was going through a chain of thoughts either. My approach genuinely puzzled then irritated her. In other words, she experienced the same emotions somebody in formal authority might experience if a subordinate asked for something strange and unreasonable.

So, if our dynamic is functionally real, it is also viscerally — emotionally — real.

It seems that the primitive part of the brain can’t tell the difference between a legally or culturally defined power relationship and a private consensual one!

This explains why a Fetlife friend of mine, who is best described as a sadist with no real interest in domination for its own sake, often finds himself in charge of things in the aftermath of a friendly “play” session: booking restaurants, organising practicalities — on a gut level both parties just feel like he’s the responsible one.

All this reinforces the conditioning on both sides of our dynamic and also adds a whole new barrier to exiting it. Maybe I can unlearn obeying Xena, but can we both unlearn feeling like she’s in charge?

What is going on?

A well-documented phenomenon, is what. Read on!

(Article unlocks next Sunday. The earlier articles of How Kinky Power Exchange becomes real are already unlocked… unlike me.)

Meet the Relational Models

No, not that kind of model!

The Four Relational Models are the four hardwired categories humans use to understand relationships:

• Communal Sharing (CS): We muddle along without keeping score while sharing deep mutual trust. “We each do the dishes when we have a moment.”

• Authority Ranking (AR): One of us is in charge or provides leadership. We may, or may not, trust them to have our best interests in sight. “She tells me when to do the dishes.”

• Equality Matching (EM): We exchange favours over time, keeping a rough score and assuming good faith. “We take it in turn to do the dishes.”

• Market Pricing (MP): We achieve balance through keeping score and sometimes minute calculations. “Doing the dishes after a dinner party is worth a week of normal sink duty.”

Different Relational Models can serve different purposes in the same relationship.

Friends might buy rounds of drinks in Equality Matching, but use Market Pricing when carpooling. A normal marriage might work with Communal Sharing for finances, Equality Matching for domestic chores, and parallel Authority Ranking for home improvements — one partner determines what gets done, the other is in charge of doing it.

Don’t cross the beams!

According to a section in Steven Pinker’s Better Angels of our Nature, you can’t easily switch between the expected Relational Models without things getting weird. You don’t offer money to a friend who cooked you a meal, nor friendship in recompense to a waiter who served you one.

This is why we’re culturally uncomfortable with sex work; it’s applying Market Pricing to a domain culturally reserved for Communal Sharing. It’s also why communicating about sex can feel difficult for some vanilla couples; it’s shifting the sex from fuzzy Communal Sharing to more calculating Equality Matching.

That difficulty in crossing the beams also explains why there’s a hump to get over when a het malesub tries to introduce D/s to a vanilla relationship. It’s supposed to be about Communal Sharing, and there’s vast cultural pressure on women to be nice, and you’re asking her to shift to Authority Ranking…

However, once you’re over the hump, the water is lovely… though as hard as an outdoor hot tub on a snowy night to climb out of. (There’s perhaps a reason for this I’ll get to next time.)

The monkey part of our brain is always paying attention to which Relational Model we’re in. It keeps us in line by serving up what it thinks are appropriate emotions.

Primal Power Exchange Relational Model Boilerplate?

I’m calling it — perhaps inexactly — “the monkey part of the brain” because this is a really primitive system, as in “pretty basic and not very clever”.

My theory is that when the monkey brain looks at the web of conditioned habits playing out to animate a power exchange relationship, it doesn’t understand role play and consent. It sees us serving and being served, suffering and luxuriating, accepting discipline and dishing it out, taking postures of submission and dominance… and just assumes we’re in an Authority Ranking situation.

I strongly suspect that the Relational Models include some hardwired boilerplate left over from ancient reproductive strategies, creating an undertow all of their own, especially given that kink offers Supernormal Stimulation. So maybe the monkey brain doesn’t just assume Authority Ranking, it also assumes a particular primal D/s dynamic.

Monkey brain then actively maintains the power exchange relationship with Positive Reinforcement emotions like satisfaction and contentment for both, and Positive Punishments such as embarrassment and guilt for the sub, and outrage and awkwardness for the dominant, adding another layer of Operant Conditioning.

The key thing is that these are real emotions.

There isn’t one shame and embarrassment for “caught trying to defeat his chastity device”, and an entirely different one for “carelessly breaking your grandmother’s expensive vase she’s had for longer than you’ve been alive”.

They’re the same thing.

How Kinky Power Exchange Becomes Real

So there’s this big messy internalisation process of feedback loops between actual power imbalance, operant conditioning, and monkey brain’s perception of what Relational Model you’re in, plus good old squirm.

And that internalisation process kicks in as soon as you establish a framework in which the dominant is pursuing their own ends in an unfiltered way, and the submissive is taking the rough with the smooth.

In other words, if you treat the power exchange as real, it becomes actually real to certain parts of the brain.

There are some caveats.

First, the internalisation process would not kick in if we had a slightly different dynamic, for example: not if we were role-playing; not if kink was more of a love language for Xena; not if I were a brat or had to struggle to obey; not if we made extensive use of traffic light safe words; not if Xena kept pushing things past my limits so that I kept safe wording; and not if our dynamic was more about me being sexually passive and less about her having authority…

It only kicks in for unfiltered power exchange, or actual authority transfer… (We need a better name for this - please share any ideas in the comments!)

Second, the reality is only real within a framework that is conditional on certain limits being respected. No matter how emotionally real my “slavery” is, Xena can’t do things that would bump me into a different Relational Model, or trigger survival instincts to override the Operant Conditioning. Nor is my slavery socially or legally real. She can’t sell me or pimp me or have me surgically modified.

Even so, that’s a lot of reality. “Careful what you wish for” turns out to be a thing.

In the final article of How Kinky Power Exchange becomes real I’m going to talk about how this applies to managing and maybe firewalling kinky dynamics; not everybody wants a lifestyle relationship. I’m also going to circle back to explore why these mechanisms might make it particularly hard for a dominant woman to hang up her whip, and maybe why some dominant women prefer their malesubs locked in chastity.

Until then, let me know what you think in the comments…

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